Instead of a myriad of project-based governance bodies, establish a divisional business body focused on managing change impacts on people and customers. This may be embedded into an existing monthly divisional leadership meeting. In this governance meeting, the focus is on:
Reviewing the data and trends of change impacts (linking with other initiative data such as benefits and scheduling)
Identifying any risks regarding the pace and the ‘amount’ of change
Identifying opportunities to link change activities with key strategic themes so that it is easier for people to digest and absorb the change
Identify opportunities to integrate roll-out activities such as training and workshops as appropriate
Decision-making on the prioritization of change releases
Monitor the feedback from impacted groups on the effectiveness of change delivery
This is not to say that project-based governance is not required. Business involvement is critical in project governance. However, a key focus should be placed on understanding the overall picture first and what the business is going to go through. From this clarity, it will then be easier to see how each initiative fits into the overall picture and if there are rollout considerations.
With clear change impact data, discussions will also be more swift, focused on more strategic conversations vs. gut feel and individual preferences. In this way, change is also being positioned as much more rigorous, data-driven, and scientific, versus fluffy, undefined, or worse, unimportant.
Embed change impact management into the operating rhythm
One way to improve change capability in an organization is to focus operations on change and implementation, versus viewing change management as a separate piece of work done by Change Managers. This involves:
Build the framework for initiative drivers to define and articulate change impacts, and own the update of initiative data in a central repository. When all initiative owners regularly update the data on change impacts, all stakeholders benefit. Initiative drivers are able to see what else is impacting the business and how to avoid any implementation bottlenecks. On the other hand, the business is able to better see the total picture.
Build agreement within the organization to create one integrated picture of change impacts, irrespective of whether a change initiative is deemed as a project, program, or a business-as-usual activity. To do this, we need to adopt the perspective of the user impacted. Changes for them could include everything ranging from policy changes, technology changes, process changes, restructuring, marketing campaigns, and product changes.
Build the management of change impacts into the roles and responsibilities of Operations. This includes a) considering change impacts in the process of resource planning, b) the ‘air traffic control’ of landing initiatives and their impacts, c) ensuring the impacted groups are ready and engaged) that the business has demonstrated the ownership and capability to adopt the change, e) managers accountable of driving the behavior embedment and monitoring of performance are clear.
The change impact data should be open for anyone to access and understand. This would then put the onus on everyone to own and drive change. The frontline should also be able to look at the plan and understand the nature of the impacts on them. This will add significant value within an environment of concurrent multiple changes.
Organizations should start with one division to test this model. Eventually, roll this out to other divisions. Once the whole organization has adopted this, an enterprise-level governance body may then be formed to promote cross-functional conversations in managing the ‘air traffic control’ and landing of initiatives. The quality of this conversation will also then be a key precursor to maximizing the benefit realization of initiatives
One of the core problems faced by companies is how to quantify change impacts and make them more tangible, easier to visualize, measure and manage.
Change impacts may be quantified in the following way:
The level of change. This denotes the intensity of the change impact. A Likert scale may be used to define and illustrate the different levels. For example, Level 1 could be minimal impacts, requiring the user only to attend a few meetings and read a few emails. However, at the highest level, the impact could be defined as significant, requiring role changes, in-depth training, and a new way of operating.
The type of change. Different categories of change may be listed, including technology changes, policy changes, marketing changes, product changes, etc.
Timing of change. This refers to the timing at which a change impact will occur. The impact may be different for different groups of stakeholders.
The scale of the impact. This denotes the number of employees impacted as an estimate.
Parts of the business impact. This refers to which parts of the business are impacted by this particular change impact.
Change activity. This includes various change activities associated with the change impact, including training, workshops, formal communications, etc.
From the information provided, the analysis may then be undertaken, looking at the loading of change, whether there is any potential change clash from a timing perspective, whether there is behavior consistency across initiatives rolled out, and whether the initiatives overall are driving the organization’s strategy forward.
Moreover, with sufficient historical data, the company may then be able to correlate the impact of the ‘amount’ of change on business performance. From this, the change impact data may then be used to even ‘predict’ future business performance. Such is the power of quantifying change impact.
Clarify customer impacts to manage customer experience
A significant number of companies are now jumping on the bandwagon of focusing on customer experience. This is because other value levers such as cost and efficiency are almost maxed out and there are few additional efficiencies that can be achieved there.
To truly manage customer experience one needs to start by understanding the total picture of what the company is planning to change for a particular group of customers. This includes:
Customer change impact data, such as change type, timing, scale, and level of change (similar to those for employees)
Customer type – this could be customer segments or other categorizations of customer groups
A positive or negative change from the customer’s perspective
Does the customer care about this change? How important is this change for the customer? It is critical to assess this from the customer’s lens, vs. the company’s lens?
After collecting these data, a customer’s experience may then be mapped out from the perspective of change impacts on their experience. Is there a number of legislative initiatives that will create a negative customer experience? Is there too much change planned? What would be the optimal ‘change loading’ for customers? The customer impact data enables valuable discussions and decisions
For smaller organizations managing change initiatives, spreadsheets may suffice. However, for large organizations managing a large portfolio of changes, spreadsheets may not be sufficient.
Technology solutions now enable both drivers and receivers of the change to access impact information any time and anywhere. This promotes collaboration and effective conversations. Companies will not need to rely on an army of analysts to constantly collect and verify the data, since the data is coming straight from ‘the source’. Reporting efforts are also optmized by having standard, automated reporting, generated at any time required.
Technology solutions are also great for agile-focused organizations where there is always a series of constant and iterative changes, and where change impact information could change rapidly from week to week. Access to accurate and timely data is even more critical.
Stakeholders across the company are also able to see, in real-time, the change impacts being planned. From this, meaningful conversations may be had in terms of the level and nature of change impacts from different stakeholder perspectives. For example, does the business share the same agreement of change impact as the program? This creates transparency and shared accountability in the ownership of change outcomes.
Use data-based feedback to improve change capability
In implementing a data-based model of managing change impacts organizations will experience an uplift in change capability. How?
After a division reviews the feedback from stakeholders after initiatives get rolled out, referencing indicated ‘amount’ of change planned, this reference ‘amount’ then becomes a yardstick for answering ‘how much is too much change’.
Moreover, with regular routines and reviews over time, the yardstick of change loading can then aid future decision making on 1) the optimal change impact loading for the business, 2) readiness activities required to better manage across changes, 3) prioritization required, and 4) potential for synchronization across initiatives (e.g. communication or training efforts).
In this way, the business division learns to determine how best to utilize change impact data to prepare for changes, avoid change fatigue, and to maximize adoption. The outcome of this is testing with ‘tactics’ of managing the changing load, and improved business performance. With open data sharing, there is also an opportunity for cross-divisional learning to pick up tips from each other on how to manage multiple changes and still deliver operational performance.
Click here to download our infographic on How to Better Manage a Change Portfolio.
Agile is all the rage at the moment in driving change and transformation. Many call out the importance of stakeholder management, communicating regularly, ensuring strong sponsorship, and clarity of business requirements. Others emphasize the need to have continual people interactions versus documentation and processes. For the uninitiated all of these seem to make sense, but yet not that different compared to using other methodologies in other projects. Agile methodologies have emerged as the catalysts for change and transformation. Anchored by principles such as stakeholder engagement, transparent communication, and robust sponsorship, Agile’s true essence lies in its unique approach – the rapid release of incremental changes, fostering a culture of continual learning and adaptability.
One of the key tenets of agile involves releasing a series of smaller changes rapidly, learning and adjusting from each release, rather than spending a longer time to work on a much bigger release that may or may not be successful.
However, releasing a series of changes can be unsettling, disruptive, and hard to keep up for employees. This is especially the case for larger programs when the timeline could go for more than 1 year. Combining several programs, you can imagine the unsettling rather of these changes on employees and the business.
How do we resolve this? The key is to provide a strong picture of the end state and how things will look like and set the expectation that there will be a series of changes, providing examples of these as well as explaining why this is an effective way to drive change. Yes, We may not know exactly the details of the end state, but the business should be clear in the overall outcomes and key works to get there.
To do this effectively we need to be able to connect the dots and tell the story of the journey of change and how the different changes connect to lead us to the end state. Sounds simple? Yet lots of companies are not able to reach this outcome due to a big pipeline of changes.
Illustrating the Power of Digital Connectivity
Agile in Software Development: Consider a software development project embracing Agile principles. Instead of the traditional monolithic release after months of development, Agile allows teams to deliver functional components regularly. Users gain hands-on experience early, providing invaluable feedback for immediate adjustments.
Navigating Business Transformation: In a complex business transformation, Agile’s iterative approach proves invaluable. Imagine a company implementing a new customer relationship management (CRM) system. Agile permits incremental updates based on user feedback, ensuring the CRM aligns seamlessly with evolving business needs.
Strategic Resource Allocation: A company grappling with a pipeline of diverse changes faces challenges in maintaining clarity. Digital tools, like ‘The Change Compass,’ offer a panoramic view, enabling leaders to visualize the interconnectedness of initiatives. This facilitates strategic decision-making and precise resource allocation.
Employee-Centric Transformations: Consider an organization rolling out changes to internal workflows. Agile, supported by digital tools, empowers leaders to communicate phased changes effectively. This ensures employees not only understand the bigger picture but also feel more engaged in the transformation process.
The solution? Use digital means to connect the dots and not rely on personal interpretation. Use a digital tool to examine what is coming down the pipeline, and therefore create meaning and better prioritize initiatives to move the business forward. By seamlessly weaving Agile methodologies into their fabric and harnessing the power of tools such as ‘The Change Compass,’ organizations adeptly steer through the ever-evolving landscape of perpetual change. Serving as a strategic guide, ‘The Change Compass’ leverages analytics and machine learning to streamline change orchestration, prioritize initiatives, and guide organizations with precision and confidence toward their transformation targets. This approach cultivates a work environment characterized by transparency, adaptability, and active engagement. As a result, the journey toward the end state transforms into a seamlessly connected narrative of continual progress and sustainable growth.
“A recent survey by the Change Management Institute (Employment Study) in 2015 indicated that 77% of all Change Management roles in Australia are contract roles. Are you surprised by this figure? Would you have expected this figure to be lower or higher? And why is it that most Change roles here are contract roles?
Many of you will state that obviously Change roles are there to help the company design and implement a change initiative and since changes are time-bound, it makes sense to employ a contract Change expert only for this duration. Others will call out that the flip side to this approach is that change capability comes and goes and the organization is not really able to build its inherent ability to.
Let’s look at how some of the most admired companies approach this. For those companies that are consistently listed the most admired global companies such as Intel, Apple, Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson, etc., the approach is very different. For these organisations there is not a lot of ongoing contract Change roles. Instead, the leadership and operations uptake the responsibilities of driving change. And yes, this includes project work where folks work on change impact assessments and implementation planning.
Take for example, at Intel the company typically redeploys its talent regionally and globally and where needed specialists may be brought in to lead or support change initiatives such as a new system implementation or new strategy. On the ground, operations leads are identified within the business and are expected to drive, support, communicate and monitor the progress of the initiative. Change capability is built into ongoing management and team development, though there are also internal training courses focused specifically on Change. This model drives significant business ownership and avoids a lot of the buck passing and challenges of reaching full benefit realization compared to the mainly contractor model.
A key requirement of this model is that the business needs to be very clear with its key focus areas in driving change and not be inundated by too many initiatives. The leadership and operational leads constantly review a dashboard of initiatives and are clear with their impacts as well as the prioritization of the initiatives.
I’m not advocating that companies do not need Change contractors at all but we need to be clear what our operating model is to build change capability. Are we only seeking a pair of hands as needed to do project work? Or do we have a more strategic approach to design change know-how within the organization? What has been your experience in designing a Change Management model that builds inherent capability?
The Change Compass is an industry-first change management tool that helps organisations manage change impacts through data vs opinions.
What are the key benefits of best practice change management process in an organization?
Effective change management enhances organizational change management agility, boosts employee engagement, maximises change efforts and minimizes resistance to change. This can apply to digital transformations or other types of significant changes. It fosters a culture of adaptability to new business processes, ensuring that teams can navigate transitions smoothly. Ultimately, it leads to improved productivity, better communication, and higher overall satisfaction among employees and stakeholders alike, driving long-term success.
In the corporate world, most approaches in defining the business value of change involve hard benefits such as revenue, cost, and time. For example, increased revenue per customer, reduced people costs, and improvement in processing time. Yes, there are non-financial benefits such as capability improvement and strategic alignment. However, in practice, most tend to focus more on hard benefits that are more tangible and easier to track.
The problem is that benefits are usually defined in a top-down, linear way and have not taken into account the environment that determines the benefits. For example, a Strategy department defines the need to cut people costs by 10% and therefore the analysis will subsequently focus on headcount reduction or pay and benefits reduction. Finance will therefore work with HR and the business to start defining which headcounts to cut and any opportunities to reduce pay and benefits. A list is then gathered to report on potential cost savings in dollar terms.
What is wrong with this scenario of defining benefits for organisational change?
On paper, everything looks fine, but without actually involving those managers in business and understanding the environment in which the costs will be saved it is hard to determine the actual benefits. How much influence do these roles have on the organization from lateral networking and influencing perspective? Can any of these roles be critical in implementing the change process? What are the potential impacts in service delivery resulting from these cuts? The learning here is that top-down analysis of benefits can often only be treated as high level and we need to work within the organization to find out the real benefits.
In a previous role, an IT department wanted to reduce the $25 per call for employees to change their passwords. When I started finding out more about the experience and the process for an employee to change passwords the discovery I made was quite shocking from an employee morale perspective. The $25 was negligible compared to the real cost. For example, my team member Barbra just returned from maternity leave and had forgotten her login password. She rang the Helpdesk 4 times to try and retrieve her password but was unsuccessful for some reason. Barbara became increasingly irate. We’ve heard her screaming at the phone, taking breaks to calm down, and talking to others to express her frustration. For days she was not able to log on. For Barbara’s case, the company has lost the equivalent of 3 days in productivity to the tune of $2500. We’ve also found other similar cases.
So how might we better analyse and assess the benefits of change initiatives?
Change management professionals can do this by observing the environment for those impacted by the change initiative, or the employee or customer experience. Utilise human-centred approaches in observing the employee or the customer and how the initiatives may impact their lives. These include observation of key stakeholders as a part of the overall change program, seeing the whole picture by putting yourself into their shoes, identifying the impacts on various people and processes, and if needed interviewing them after observation to find out more. What else will be happening in their worlds other than the change initiative in concern? Will there be risks of overlaps or time conflicts for different initiatives?
Change managers can tally various sources of benefits observed. Who are the people potentially impacted by the change initiative? What processes and systems are impacted by the new technology or new software? Therefore, what are the sources of potential benefits in terms of time, cost, or revenue? Have a chat with your business leaders to confirm on these.
Test change initiative and benefits before large-scale rollout
As a part of the change management practices, test at a smaller scale initial change implementation approaches on the selected target audience and observe the effects of change and resulting benefits. Take an proactive approach to experiment and tweak these approaches before larger-scale implementation.
What are the key benefits of effective change management in an organization?
Effective change management enhances organizational agility, improves employee engagement, and boosts productivity. It minimizes resistance to change by fostering clear communication and support, leading to smoother transitions and minimise unrealized benefits. Ultimately, these benefits contribute to sustained growth and a competitive edge in today’s rapidly evolving business landscape.
In the new digital world, we are all about using technology and the web to make our lives easier, more productive, and efficient. However, in the change management world, there is not a lot of tools out there to help us become leaner and more effective in managing change. A lot of other functions and disciplines have a range of digital tools to help them become more effective, but the same range of change management software is not yet available for change practitioners.
Why do we need software to manage change impacts?
In large companies, most departments are siloed and therefore it is difficult to get one integrated view of all changes
As the pace of change increases many companies are finding it simply too complex to try and manage change using spreadsheets. Change initiative information, like any data, becomes redundant very quickly therefore we need technology tools to help keep the data current.
Change impact information is critical for operational resource planning and managing customer experience. Constant and relevant data is required. Without a view of all the change impacts, including those deemed projects, improvement initiatives, Six Sigma, cultural change, product launches it is hard for us to see what changes are going to happen.
Often we are making business change decisions based on opinions and with the right software we can ensure that we are using data to make decisions
What are some of the existing offerings?
A quick search through the posts and articles in this Linkedin group has surfaced mostly with technical change management tools. There are lots of tools that focus on digital engagement, social networks, and collaboration. These include Pinipa, Sharepoint, and Change Scout. And others focus on Training such as WalkMe.
What is the current gap?
Most companies have data on typical project information such as cost and timeline. However, what we need is information on the nature of the change impact on employees and customers, e.g. what type of change, the quantum of change, when, in what location, and who are impacted.
The Change Compass provides a solution for companies undergoing multiple changes to have an integrated view of change impacts and guides business leaders to make the right data-based decisions.
As change practitioners, we often hear that Change is intangible and hard to measure – A key concern with change management metrics. As a result, the discipline is often perceived as less value-adding and less critical to the business and program performance. We work with technical, finance, process, and operations specialists who often do not get what we are on about.
In Michael Tushman’s Harvard Business Review article about change management he asserted that change management must become more data-driven to keep up with business demands. Otherwise, change management will no longer contribute critical value to the organisation that it should, and instead, risk being overlooked.
A typical scenario that Change practitioners often complain about is that they are in a typical project meeting where everyone is consumed with technical defects, testing data, project cost, and delivery resource requirements. From an analytics and reporting perspective, I often hear how hard it is to highlight and position the importance of Change data. But, as a part of Change delivery, we do produce various data to track progress. Why are we still not able to be at the centre of the table?
The problem is that most of the data we produce is data that is not positioned to link strongly to ultimate business outcomes. For example:
Employee feedback
Employee opinions are useful and insightful, however, this often reflects what stakeholders already suspected.
Change readiness surveys
Again, potentially useful and insightful. But, is agreeing to the statements in the survey equivalent to actual behavior change? (i.e. knowing vs doing) Does positive survey results guarantee business impact and full benefits realized.
Training completion rates
Training completion rates may be a minimum requirement to ensure the knowledge transfer has happened. However, will the behavior change? What is the impact on the operations?
What else to focus on measuring?
What we need is to focus on the critical business outcomes and be able to demonstrate how change management data provides leading indicators to:
1) the likelihood of realizing initiative benefits, and
2) impact on the business.
For example, if an organization is focused on improving customer experience, then we need to demonstrate how initiatives could impact their experience. Firstly, we need to work out to what extent the customer cares about the effects of the initiative, the magnitude of the impacts on customers, and whether the impacts are positive or negative (from the perspective of the customer).
With our understanding of employee and stakeholder readiness and adoption levels, these can be turned into the extent to which benefits may be realised. Any potential blockers in terms of adoption progress and sentiments may be utilised as an indication for benefit realisation.
Example of setting up a Change dashboard from Change Automator
In these ways, we have demonstrated the importance of managing change impacts over the timeline since any increase or decrease in customer experience could equate to hundreds of millions of dollars (according to Forrester research). Suddenly, we are now talking about top-line revenue impacts that will put us in the centre of attention. What has been your experience in linking change data to business results?
Managing customer experience has been in vogue for a number of years. This is particularly the case for competitive industries where there is little differentiation in terms of price points and services offered such as banking, retail and utilities. Touting the company’s focus on ‘customer experience is the new mantra for a lot of companies.
Most financial services firms and telecom companies, amongst others, have been jumping on this bandwagon and have built various customer experience teams and centres of excellence. However, for large innovative US companies such Starbucks, Apple and Intel, Customer Experience has been at the heart of how products and services have been designed for over 20 years.
What are the key challenges in driving customer experience management? Research by Harvard Business Review Analytics Services in 2014 showed that 51% of companies surveyed indicated one of their top challenges to be achieving a single view of the customer. In addition, 51% of companies surveyed also indicated that building new customer experiences is another key challenge. These two are not mutually exclusive as you may point out.
This conundrum strikes at the heart of the reality for large organisations – the ability to integrate different sources of customer data across different departments, channels, and systems into a picture that can be easily understood and utilised. This is necessary to truly achieve a single view of the customer. It is then through a single view of the customer that companies may be able to change or build new customer experiences.
However, there is one very large gap in this equation. The key focus on driving customer experience improvements through data has been on CRM systems that capture various customer and marketing data. CRM systems have focused on providing effective marketing automation, salesforce automation, and contact centre automation. Other than data companies have also invested heavily in digital and other self-service channels.
What about the other side of the equation? I.e. an integrated single picture of the initiatives that the company is driving to define/change the customer experience (intentionally or unintentionally)?
These initiatives include not only marketing and promotional campaigns, but also product changes, legislative change communications, pricing changes, IT changes, and even other companies’ initiatives that can indirectly impact customer service or the media. Most large organisations either have no way of creating this integrated picture or have disconnected spreadsheets that track segments of the overall initiatives.
What risks does this create for companies? By not having an integrated picture of how a company is impacting and shaping its customer experience it cannot truly manage that experience holistically. Banks often experience this. One department called for a credit card to be end of life whilst another called for increased sales to meet the target. The bankers and customers became very confused as you can imagine. A 2013 Ernst & Young survey found that companies are losing $720 per negative customer experience. The same research also found that 40% of households have had a negative experience with a telecommunications company, whilst 25% have had a negative experience with a utilities company. There is a lot of money at stake here as you can see.
The solution is to piece together all company change initiatives that impact customers (directly, and indirectly through employees) with a specific focus on change impacts.
A single view of change impact data of what type of customer, when, to what level, with what change, etc. can be integrated with other sources of customer data (e.g. CRM system data and customer experience mapping info) to create a powerful picture of:
-What the company is planning to roll out to customers at a holistic and aggregate level, and how this is shaping the customer experience?
-How aligned or misaligned these customer change impacts are with the customer strategy?
-To what extent there are clashes amongst different change initiatives from different departments in conveying the targeted customer experience?
-To what extent there is too much or too little change in shaping the customer experience within the initiative pipeline, as aligned with the strategy?
-From these powerful integrated pictures of what is happening to the customer’s experience critical decisions may be made to best design the optimal experience?
Here is an example of a customer heatmap that outlines key initiative impacts on various customer segements.
Given the rapid pace of industry changes across numerous industries and sectors, it is not surprising that most companies are dealing with at least several significant change initiatives. For many companies, the approach is to hire a Change practitioner as a contractor to carry out various tasks so that change is managed.
Is this the right approach? Is hiring contractor Change practitioners considered outsourcing too much of a core management responsibility and capability? Smaller companies may not have the luxury of having full-time Change practitioners on staff, so wouldn’t this be the best approach? For larger companies with multiple change initiatives, wouldn’t this also be the best approach to cater to business needs and achieve resource efficiency? In many countries, this seems to be the standard approach. Is this wrong?
Firstly, is change management a core part of management and leadership? Most would agree that, given the rapidly changing industries we are facing, change management forms a key requirement for successful leadership, and that a leader simply will not be successful without good Change Management skills.
This is also widely supported by most authorities: There are numerous Harvard Business Review articles on this, with one calling out that “Change is one of the skills leaders need at every level” (Zenger & Folkman, 2014). Warren Bennis, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at conferences (and who sadly passed away a few years ago), continually acknowledged that “a leader has to be able to change an organization”. Jack Welch was renowned as a strong leader in driving total cultural change at GE, and Marissa Mayer is applauded for driving significant product changes at Yahoo within a short period of time.
So, if Change Management is a core part of management and leadership what are the risks of outsourcing this activity?
One company I consulted for was a large Australian company with several large-scale change initiatives being rolled out concurrently. What struck me about this company was that Change Management was treated more as a project activity that is outside of Operations and can therefore be managed through additional project staff such as contractors. Managers were more than happy to send communications to staff and to participate in various Change Management activities, but did not see this as their core accountability. The common perception by managers was that the external Change practitioner’s job was to help them execute the initiative, more as a pair of hands to do the work.
As a result, what typically happened with larger transformations was that it was hard to drive behavioral change that led to clear business results because Managers did not feel they owned this personally. By the time management had realized that targeted benefits were not achieved, the project had folded and contractors had moved on to the next project.
The typical scenario then was management blaming contractors and providers and other extraneous business factors. Even for those initiatives that had somehow landed well without significant management sponsorship, the result was that the company had not progressed in building change capability, year in year out. Luckily, this was a government-regulated industry with little industry competition. In other industries, this company would basically not be able to survive.
From this example, you can see that if the approach was to continually outsource Change Management, there is a risk that managers do not sufficiently own and drive the initiative, and results will therefore not be achieved. Moreover, the company not only incurs more cost to rely on external support, but it also risks not developing the ability to implement the changes outlined in its strategy and successfully drive initiatives to compete in a changing industry.
So, developing one’s Change Management capability is critical. However, lots of companies have spent significant investment in sending managers and staff to various training courses to learn how to better deal with or manage change. It is not always the case that change capability investment leads to improved organizational capability, or even people capability. Why? There could be myriad reasons for this. This is like asking why training investment doesn’t always lead to direct workplace application and therefore business benefits. We can probably all name training courses we’ve been on where we felt inspired; however, the enthusiasm started to wane as soon as we left the training session.
Recommended approaches to build change capability
How would one develop change capability in a way that will lead to sustained capability improvement and business results? There are several approaches that I recommend:
For companies lacking in fundamental change management capability, hire a change consultant who can work with you on leading change initiatives and embed business capability development as a part of the work. Key up-and-coming talents may be selected to participate in the project. However, the key is to look for consultants who have experience in developing broad organizational capabilities (vs. skills training) as well as project delivery. This may involve coaching managers, conducting brown-bag sessions, facilitating change agent sessions, facilitating planning sessions, aligning with the performance management system, etc.
For companies wishing to acquire a broader level of change capability, training may help to provide a clear understanding. However, without direct application of what was learned and receiving ongoing feedback to master the skill, the learning may simply remain on the shelf. Again, after training has been rolled out, work with Change practitioners who can design ongoing capability development as a part of initiative planning & execution to further embed the learning.
For larger companies with numerous concurrent change initiatives, work on developing change processes and systems to manage the overall portfolio of initiatives. This includes developing an integrated view and a central repository of change initiatives, details of initiative impact (including employee, business, and customer impacts), benefits targeted, and delivery risks.
A robust, integrated view of changes across the company should also be complemented by operating rhythms where regular dashboards and reports are fed into Operations and Leadership discussions. This ensures that managers regularly review the progress of changes, are aware of identified risks, and can make data-based decisions to maximize benefit realization. The onus is on managers to be accountable for the successful progress of initiatives.
At an enterprise level, an integrated operating rhythm for Change Management will also help break silos and highlight cross-divisional work required in successful change delivery. This essentially means that managers across divisions can regularly discuss change implementation issues and risks, and work together to overcome these.
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References
Reinventing Leadership: Strategies to Empower the Organization (2005), by Warren G. Bennis and Robert Townsend, p. 91
“The Skills Leaders Need at Every Level”, Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman, July 20, 2014, Harvard Business Review
